Archive: Patt Morrison Asks

Patt Morrison Asks will appear in this space every Saturday and will feature leading thinkers, policy makers, cultural figures and otherwise fascinating and important people -- all in conversation with Patt. As she rolls out these columns, well collect them here so you can read past interviews as well as the current weeks.

Interviews are edited and excerpted from longer taped and transcribed conversations. In this process, questions and answers may be shortened, removed entirely, and related questions or answers may be combined. "Uhms" and "ers" and the like are excised; words and descriptions added for clarification are bracketed. In editing, care is taken not to take questions or answers out of context.

Click here to read Patt Morrison's Opinion L.A. blogposts. An archive of her Op-Ed columns can be found here.

August 29, 2009

PATT MORRISON ASKS

Gloria Molina

Gloria Molina's life has been one of contradictions: the famous feminist politician from East L.A., the career policymaker/politician who still feels like an outsider. She can claim many "firsts," a lot of admirers and a lot of political foes. The first Latina elected to the Legislature, to the Los Angeles City Council, and the first woman and Latina elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she'll likely be until she is termed out in 2014. Her reputation is one of picking fights, but she also picks her fights -- killing a proposed prison in East L.A. in the 1980s, watchdogging cushy government pensions and perks and budget practices, and looking out for Los Angeles' poor, of which she was once one herself, the eldest of 10 kids of a poor Mexican immigrant. You may see her only in TV news clips, jabbing a finger on some point. There's more, and some slow-mo, to GloMo.

August 8, 2009

PATT MORRISON ASKS / VINCENT BUGLIOSI

Taking on Charles Manson

Vincent Bugliosi has moved on, but the world hasn't. Forty years after the impossibly grisly Tate-LaBianca murders, he is still "the Manson prosecutor." This, in spite of his many books since, arguing with magisterial fury about the JFK assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bush vs. Gore case and now the Iraq war.

July 25, 2009

PATT MORRISON ASKS | THEODORE B. OLSON

Legal eagle

When you've pleaded a case before the United States Supreme Court, your memento, your trophy, is a white quill. Some lawyers get one and treasure it forever. Ted Olson has enough to fletch an eagle, and he hopes to add one more -- legalizing same-sex marriage. During the Republican glory years in Washington, Olson was a GOP pillar: at the first meeting of the Federalist Society, on the board of directors of American Spectator magazine, stalwart of the Reagan administration. It was Olson who argued George W. Bush's case to the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore in 2000, securing the presidency. He grew up and was educated in California, elementary school through law school, and lived on the Palos Verdes peninsula before going all Beltway on us. And now he's back at his old law firm and working with an old adversary, David Boies, who argued Al Gore's side of the 2000 election. They've launched a challenge to Proposition 8 that could find them together again before the high court -- but on the same side, arguing that same-sex marriage should be part of mainstream America. Who'da thunk it?

May 16, 2009

PATT MORRISON ASKS: ELI BROAD

A Broad view

I'm enough of a workaholic to recognize another one, even if I have to do it from a long way off and by the back of his head. That's Eli Broad up ahead. The man who hates the b-word -- "billionaire" -- prefers the p-word, "philanthropist." With his wife, Edythe, he plays on a bigger board than a hundred average workaholics: in education, science, the arts and L.A.'s civic life. His foundation writes checks to charter schools, Teach for America, a zealous arts program that lends the Broads' collections to museums around the world. The lifted-eyebrow crowd finds fault with his unapologetic big-checkbook activism, but nobody can doubt that the Broads help circle L.A. on the cultural map. Around town, he's Eli, maybe because, like Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, some people aren't sure how to pronounce his surname (it rhymes with "road"), and maybe because he's joined that exalted one-name pantheon. And, for a guy with so much on his plate, he's a pretty fair dancer. I know: I won a bet asking him to dance at the City Hall rededication seven years ago. (And hey, you guys still haven't paid up; you know who you are.)